Legacy

13

D ag woke well after dark, to roll his aching body up, pull on his boots without lacing them, and stagger to the slit trench. The night air was chill and dank, but the two patrollers on duty had kept the campfire burning with a cheery orange glow. One waved to Dag as he wandered past, and Dag returned the silent salute. The scene looked deceptively peaceful, as though they watched over comrades merely sleeping.

After relieving himself, Dag considered more sleep. His bone-deep grinding fatigue of earlier seemed scarcely improved. The marsh remained silent—this hour should have been raucous with frogs, insects, and night birds—and eerily odorless. Either the reek of its normal life or the stench of death should have saturated this foggy air. Well, the rot would come in time, a week or a month or six or next spring. Which, while it would doubtless smell repulsive enough to gag anyone for a mile downwind, would be a first sign of life beginning its repair of the blight—rot had a lively ground of its own.

Dag stared at the grove, the campfire seeming like a lantern among the trees, remembering his patrol’s first approach…only yesterday? If this was after midnight—he glanced at the wheel of the stars—he could call it two days ago, though that seemed scarcely more reasonable. Frowning thoughtfully, he counted a careful two hundred paces away from the grove and found a stump to sit upon. He stretched out his aching legs. If he had opened his groundsense at this distance before without triggering the trap, presumably he might do it again.

He hissed in surprise as he eased his veil apart for the first time in days. Cramping, Mari had described his closure, and that seemed barely adequate to describe this shaking agony. Normally, he paid as little attention to his own ground as he did to his body, the two conflating seamlessly. Meaning to examine the groundlocked makers, Dag instead found his inner senses wrenched onto himself.

In the ground of his right arm a faint heat lingered, last vestiges of the healing reinforcement snatched from, or gifted by, Hoharie’s apprentice. Over time such a reinforcement was slowly absorbed, converted from the donor’s ground into that of the recipient’s, not unlike the way his food became Dag. Even this trace would be gone altogether in a few more weeks. In the ground of his left arm…

His ghost hand was not there at the moment. The ground of his arm was spattered with a dozen dark spots, black craters seeming like holes burned in a cloth from scattered sparks. A few more throbbed on his neck and down his left side. Surrounding them in gray rings were minute patches of blight. This wasn’t just fading reverberation from a malice-handling like Utau’s, though that echoed in him too. The spots were the residue, he realized, of the ground he’d ripped from the malice in that desperate night-fight. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, yet immediately recognizable. Strangely familiar seemed the perfect summation, actually.

But then, he’d never before met up with anyone crazed enough to try to ground-rip a malice. Maybe he was seeing why it was not a recommended technique? Injury or healing to a living body injured or healed its ground in turn; ground-ripping or prolonged exposure to blight killed a body through its ravaged ground. What was this peculiar infestation doing to his body now? Nothing good, he suspected. With this map to guide him, he could trace deep aches in his flesh that centered over the splotches, if barely distinguishable from his present general malaise. Pain marked damage, normally. What kind of damage?

So…was the pulsating grayness slowly being absorbed by Dag’s ground, or…or was the blight spreading? He swallowed and stared, but could sense no discernible change.

Stands to reason, he could almost hear Spark say. How would a smart little farmer girl analyze this? What were the possibilities?

Well, his ground could be slowly repairing itself, as in any other wound. Or his ground might be unable to repair itself until the sources of injury were removed, the way an arrow had to be extracted before the flesh around it could start to knit. Sometimes, if more rarely, flesh knitted around a fragment that could not be removed. Sometimes it closed but festered. Or…was the blight spreading out faster than his ground could repair it? In which case…

In which case, I’m looking at my death wound. A mortality flowing as slowly as honey in winter, as inexorably as time.

Spark, no, how long do we—?

In a spasm of inspiration, he tried to call up his ghost hand to grip a splotch, tear it out, dump it in the soil, anywhere—was it possible to ground-rip yourself? — but his odd power remained elusive. He then massaged around a spot on his left ribs with his right hand, willing its ground to reach in, but found it as impossible as to will flesh to penetrate flesh. The effort made his side twinge, however.

An even more horrific possibility occurred to him then. The fragments of the first great malice-king, it was said, grew into the plague of the world. What if each of these fragments had the same potential? Could I turn into a malice? Or malice food?

Dag bent his head and huffed through his open mouth, his hand clutching his hair. Oh, absent gods, do you hate me that much? Or he might split into a dozen malices—or—no, a dominant one would no doubt conquer and subsume the others, then emerge the lone victor of…what? Once the miniature malice had consumed all the ground and the life of the body it lived in, it, too, presumably must die. Unless it could escape…

Dag panted for breath in his panic, then swallowed and sat up. Let’s go back to the death-wound idea, please? What if this was not a spew of malice seed, but more like a spatter of malice blood, carrying the toxic ground but not capable of independent life for long. Indeed—gingerly, he turned his senses inward again—there was not that sense of nascent personality that even the lowliest sessile malice exuded. Poison, yes. He could live with—well, be happy with—well…

He sat for several shaken minutes in the silent dark, then peeked again. No change. It seemed he was not dissolving into gray dust on the spot. Which meant he was doomed to wake up to his responsibilities in the morning all the same. So. He’d had a reason for coming out here. What was it…?

He inhaled and, very cautiously, extended his groundsense outward once more. The lingering blight all around nibbled at him, but it was ignorable. He found the dead trees in the grove, the trapped mud-men beyond, the live patrollers on night watch. He steered away from the groundlocked makers, barely letting his senses graze them. Before, he had found a gradient of ground moving through the soil, sucked into the making of the mud-man nursery. Did such a draw sustain it still?

No. The death of the malice had done that much good, at least.

Or…maybe not. The mud-men were still alive, even if they’d stopped growing. Therefore, they must still be drawing ground, if slowly. The only source of ground in the system was the locked makers and, now, the three fresh patrollers. And he did not think their depleted bodies could produce new ground fast enough to keep up. What must be the end of it, if this accursed lock could not be broken?

The weakest makers would likely die first. With them gone, increased stress would be thrown onto the survivors, who would not last long, Dag suspected. Death would cascade; the remainder must die very quickly. At which point the mud-men would also die. Would that be the end of it, the problem collapsing into itself and gone? Or were there other elements, hidden elements at work inside the lock?

No one could find out without opening their ground to the lock. No one could open their ground to the lock without being sucked into it, it seemed. Impasse.

My head hurts. My ground hurts. But no such collapse was happening now. Dag clutched the thought to himself as if it were hope. Perhaps the morning would bring better counsel, or even better counselors than one battered old patroller so frighteningly out of his depth. Dag sighed, levered himself up, and stumbled back to his bedroll.

What the morning brought was distractions, mainly. A pair of scouts returned from the south to report much the sort of chaos Dag expected—farmer and Lakewalker refugees scattered all over, improvised defenses in disarray—but also encouraging signs of people beginning to sort themselves out with the news of the death of the malice. About midday, some two dozen Bonemarsh exiles cautiously approached. Dag assigned his patrol of cleanup volunteers the initial task of helping them to identify and bury their dead, including the woman maker, and scavenge the village for still-usable supplies that might be carried off to the other north Raintree camps that would be taking in the nearly two thousand homeless. The Raintree Lakewalkers were likely in for a straitened winter, coming up. Bonemarsh casualties, he was glad to learn, had been relatively low. No one seemed to know yet if the same had been the case for that farmer town the malice had taken first.

Three of the Bonemarsh folks agreed to stay and help nurse their groundlocked makers and the hapless would-be rescuers. The makers all had names, now, and life stories that the returned refugees had determinedly pressed on Dag. He wasn’t sure if that helped. In any case, he sent the first batch of locals off with a patroller escort and an earnest request to send him back any spare medicine makers or other experts who might be able to get a grip on his lethal puzzle. But he didn’t expect much help from that quarter, as every medicine maker in Raintree had to be up to the ears in nearer troubles right now.

He had slightly more hope of the full patrol of twenty-five he sent home that afternoon, carrying both a warning to Hickory Lake of their neighbor’s impending winter shortages, and a much more urgently worded plea for Hoharie or some equally adept maker to come to his aid. To stay at Bonemarsh, Dag selected the best medicine makers—for patrollers—his company had, including several veteran mothers or grandmothers, whom he figured for already knowing how to keep alive people who couldn’t talk or walk or feed themselves. Small ones, anyway. They can work up.

He hadn’t expected them to work up to him, however. “Dag,” said Mari, with her usual directness, “the bags under your eyes are so black you look like a blighted raccoon. Have you had anybody look you over yet?”

He’d been thinking of quietly hauling one of the better field medicine fellows out of range of the grove to examine him. Mari, he realized glumly, was not only at the top of that list by experience and ground-sense skill, but would corner any substitute and have the story ripped out of him in minutes anyway. Might as well save steps.

“Come on,” he sighed. She nodded in stern satisfaction.

He led off to his stump of last night, or one like it, sat, and cautiously opened himself. It took a couple of minutes, and he ended with his head bent nearly to his knees. Still hurts.

He heard a long, slow hiss through her teeth that for Mari was as scary as swearing. In a tone of cool understatement, she observed, “Well, that don’t look so good. What is that black crap?”

“Some sort of ground contamination. It happened when I…” he started to say, ground-ripped the malice, but changed it to, “when I tried to draw the malice off from Utau, and it turned on me. It was like bits of it stuck to me, and burned. I couldn’t get rid of it. Then I closed up and passed out.”

“You sure did. I thought you were just ground-ripped—hah, listen to me, just ground-ripped—like Utau. Does that, um…hurt? Looks like it ought to.”

“Yeah.” Dag turned his groundsense on himself, closing his eyes for an instant to feel more clearly. Two of the gray patches on his left arm, separate last night, seemed to have grown together since like two water droplets joining. I’m losing ground.

Mari said hesitantly, “You want me to try anything? Think a bit of ground reinforcement might help, or a match?”

“Not sure. I wouldn’t want to get this crud stuck to you. I suspect it’s”—lethal—“not good. Better wait. It’s not like I’m falling over.”

“It’s not like you’re dancing a jig, either. This isn’t like…Utau’s ground, it’s like it’s scraped raw, shivering and won’t stop, but you can see it’ll come right in its own time. This…yeah, this is outside my ken. You need a real medicine maker.”

“That’s what I figured. Hope one shows up soon. Meantime, well, I can still walk, it seems. If not jig.” Dag hesitated. “If you can refrain from gossiping about this all over camp, I’d take it kindly.”

Mari snorted. “So if this had happened to any other patroller, how fast would you have slapped him onto the sick list?”

“Privileges of captaincy,” Dag said vaguely. “You know that road, patrol leader.”

“Yeah? Would that be the privilege to be stupid? Funny, I don’t seem to recall that one.”

“Look, if anybody with more skill shows up here to hand this mess on to, you bet I’ll be on my horse headed east in an hour.” Except that he could not ride away from what he carried inside, now, could he? “I have no idea who the Raintree folks can spare or when, but I figure the soonest we could get help from home is six days.” He stared around; the afternoon was growing hazy, with a brassy heat in the air that foreboded evening thundershowers.

Mari glanced toward the grove, and said quietly, “Think those folks will last six more days?”

Dag let out a long breath and heaved himself to his feet. “I don’t know, Mari. Does look like we need to rustle up some kind of tent covering to gather them under, though. Rain tonight, you think?”

“Looks like,” she agreed.

They strolled silently back to the dead grove.

He wasn’t sure how much Mari talked, or didn’t, but a lot of people in the grove camp that evening seemed to take it as their mission to tell him to go lie down. He was persuadable, except that with nothing to do but sit cross-legged on his bedroll and stare at the groundlocked makers, he found himself drifting into hating them. Without this tangle, he could have gone home with today’s patrol. In three days’ time, held Spark hard and not let go even for breathing. His earlier weariness of this long war was as nothing to his present choked surfeit. He slept poorly.

By late the following afternoon, two of the older makers had lost the ability to swallow, and one was having trouble breathing. As Carro, one of Mari’s cronies from Obio’s patrol, held the man up in her lap in an effort to ease him, Dag knelt beside the bedroll and studied his labored gasps. Breathing this bad in a dying man was normally a signal to share, and soon. But was this fellow dying? Need he be? His thinning hair was streaked with gray, but he was hardly elderly; before this horror had fallen on him, Dag judged him to have been hale, lean and wiry. Artin was his name, Dag didn’t want to know, an excellent smith and something of a weapons-master. Under his own tracing fingers, Dag could read a lifetime of accumulated knowledge in the subtle calluses of Artin’s hands.

Mari blotted the face and hair of the nearby woman she had just spent several fruitless minutes trying to get water down, while the woman had writhed and choked. “If we can’t get more drink into them in this heat, they aren’t going to last anything like five more days, Dag.”

Carro nodded to the man in her lap. “This one, less.”

“I see that,” murmured Dag.

Saun paced about. Dag had guessed he would volunteer for the patrol lingering in Raintree to assist the refugees, and indeed he’d scorned an offer to ride back to Hickory Lake yesterday; but, taking his partnership with Dag seriously, he’d instead requested assignment to this duty. He slept in the now-reduced camp to the east off the blight, but lived at Dag’s left elbow in the daytime. Which would be a fine thing if only Saun acted less like a flea on a griddle in the face of these frustrations.

Now he declared, “We have to try something. Dag, you say you think these makers are still supporting the mud-men. If that’s so, doesn’t it make sense to cut off the load?”

“Obio and Griff said they tried that,” said Dag patiently. “The results were pretty alarming, I gathered.”

“But no one died. It could be like one of Hoharie’s cuttings, hurting to heal.”

It was a shrewd argument, and it attracted Dag more than the prospect of just sitting here watching while these people suffered and failed. My company. He wasn’t quite sure how these Raintree makers had become honorary members of it in his mind, but they had. His three unconscious patrollers were the least depleted, so far, but Dag could see that wasn’t going to last.

“I admit,” Dag said slowly, “I’d like to see what happens for myself.” Although how much telling detail he was likely to observe with his groundsense closed was a bitter question. “Maybe…do one. And then we’ll see.”

Saun gave him a quick nod of understanding and went to fetch his sword. It was the same weapon that had put Saun in harm’s way back at Glassforge; Dag had heroically refrained from pointing out how useless the deadweight had been to Saun on this trip, too. But for dispatching mud-men in their pots, it would do nearly as well as a spear, and better than a knife.

Sword over his shoulder, Saun trod determinedly back through the grove and out toward the boggy patch, his boots squelching in the mud from last night’s rain. He slowed, trying to pick his way more cleanly upon clumps of dead grasses, and peered down into the mud pots with a look of curious revulsion.

The unformed monsters therein were in a revolting enough state, distorted past any hope of returning to their animal lives, and equally far from transformation to their mock-human forms. Innocent but doomed. Dag’s brow furrowed. So—if their transformation could somehow be completed, with the malice dead would they switch their slavish allegiance to the Lakewalker makers? It was a disturbing idea, as if Dag’s brain didn’t teem with enough of those already. The more disturbing for being seductive. Powerful subhuman servants might be used for a multitude of desperately needed tasks. Had the mage-lords of old made something like them? All malices seemed to hatch with the knowledge, not to mention the compulsion, of such makings, which suggested it was an old, old skill. But the mud-slaves presumably would require a continuous supply of ground reinforcement to live, making them lethally expensive to maintain.

Dag was glad to give over this line of thought as Saun called, “Which should I start with? The biggest?”

Mari, her face screwed up in doubt as she stared down at the damp woman maker, said, “The smallest?”

“I’m not sure it matters,” Dag called back. “Just pick one.”

Saun stepped toward a mud pot, gripped his sword in both hands, braced his shoulders, squinted, and struck. Squalling and splashing rose from the hole, and flying mud; Saun grimaced, pulled back, and struck hastily again.

“What was it?” Mari called.

“Beaver. I think. Or maybe woodchuck.” Saun jumped back, looking sick, as the splashing died away.

Carro’s cry wrenched Dag’s attention around. The makers—all the groundlocked folk—were writhing and moaning in their bedrolls, as if in pain—deep, inarticulate animal sounds. The other two on-duty patrollers hurried to their sides, alarmed. The makers did not seem to be actually convulsing, so Dag stifled a wild look around for something to shove between teeth besides his hook, bad idea, or his fingers.

Artin’s breathing passed from labored to choked. Carro pulled down his blanket and pressed her ear to his chest. “Dag, this isn’t good.”

“No more, Saun!” Dag called urgently over his shoulder, and bent to Artin’s other side. The smith’s lips were turning a leaden hue, and his eyelids fluttered.

“His heartbeat’s going all wrong,” said Carro. “Sounds like partridge wings.”

Just before the archer shoots the bird out of the air? Dag continued the unspoken thought. His heart is failing. Blight it, blight it…

Saun hurried back; Dag raised his glance from Saun’s muddy boots to his suddenly drained face. Saun’s lips parted, but no sound came out. Dag needed no words to interpret that particular appalled look, of a heart going hollow with fear and guilt. You should not shoulder such a burden, boy. No one should. But someone had to.

Not today, blight it.

Help might be coming, if the makers could be kept alive till then. Somehow. He remembered, for some reason, his impulsive attack on the malice’s cave back in Glassforge. Any way that works, old patroller.

“I’m going to try a ground match,” Dag said abruptly, moving to get a better grip on Artin’s shuddering body. “Dance his heart back to the right beat, if I can.” As he had once done for Saun.

Mari’s voice called sharply, “Dag, no!”

He was already opening his ground. Finding his way into the other’s body through his ground. Pain on pain, clashing rhythms, but Dag’s dance was the stronger one. The true world rushed back into his awareness, blight and glory and all, and he became aware of how keenly he’d missed his groundsense, as if he’d been walking around for days with the best part of himself bloodily amputated. Dance with me, Artin.

Dag breathed satisfaction as he felt the smith’s heart and lungs take up a steadier, stronger cadence once more. Dag did not share in such shocking pain as Saun’s injuries, but he could feel the fragility in the maker’s ground, how close it was to the edge of another such fall into disorder and death. Were the others as weakened? Dag’s perceptions widened in increasing fascination.

All the Lakewalkers’ grounds were wound about and penetrated by a subtle gray structure like ten thousand tangled threads. The threads combined and darkened, running out like strands of smoke to the mud-men’s pots. The mud-men’s grounds were the strangest of all: turned black, strong, compellingly human in shape. The fleshly bodies of the animals labored in vain, straining to match that impulsion. Starving in their arrested growth.

The malice spatters on Dag’s ground seemed to be shivering in time with the complex ground structure imprisoning the makers, and Dag had a sudden terror that somehow the still-living malice bits lodged within him were what was keeping this thing intact. Would he have to die for it to be broken…? Ah. No. Affinity both had with each other, no question, but his spatters were as formless as a ground reinforcement, if an inverted one that was negative and destructive rather than positive and healing.

Dag struggled to understand what he was sensing. In normal persuasive making, the maker pushed and reinforced ground found within the object, striving to make things more themselves, as in Dag’s old arrowproof coat where the protection of skin became leather became a shield. In healing, ground was gifted freely, unformed, to be turned into the recipient’s ground without resistance. A ground match, such as he had just done for Artin, was a dance in time. The malices’ enslavement of farmer minds, Dag realized suddenly, must also be such a ground dance, if enormously powerful to work so compulsively and at such distances. But it had to be continuously maintained, as he had glimpsed from the inside during this last kill, and the match died when the malice did. It has a limited range, too, he realized, which was why the malice had been forced to move along with its army.

This groundwork, though…had a range of only a hundred paces, but it had most certainly survived its malice maker. Contained, powerful, horrific…familiar. Familiar? So where have I seen anything like this before? What groundwork both survived its maker’s death and retained the nature of its maker, not melding with its recipient, even after it had been released?

Sharing knives do. On a smaller scale, to be sure, but…scarcely less complex. The ground of the consecrated knife was shaped by its maker into an involuted container for the donor’s future death, and that dissolving ground, once received, was held tight. Altered, if with and not against the donor’s will, to something lethal to malices.

Dar must be giving something of himself away with each knife he made, Dag reflected. On some level, folks knew this, which was why they treated their knife makers with such care. How draining was such a making? Again and again and again? Very. No wonder Dar had so little left of himself for any other purpose.

Dag turned his inner eye back upon the malice’s groundwork. This huge, horrific making was involuted and powerful beyond any scope he would ever have. But—beyond his understanding, as well?

The intuitive leap was effortless, like flying in a dream. I see how this may be broken! He grinned and opened his eyes.

Tried to grin. Tried to open his eyes.

Face, eyes, body were gone from him; his mind seemed one with his ground, floating cut off from the outer world. Gray threads wound into him like little searching mouths, like worms, sucking and consuming.

I’m trapped—

Fawn carefully tucked the dozen new beeswax candles that were her share of the afternoon’s making into Dag’s trunk, closed the lid, drifted out under her tent awning, and stared through the trees at the leaden gleam of the lake under the humid sky. She scratched absently at one of the mosquito bites speckling her bare arms, and pawed at a whine near her ear. Yet another reason to miss Dag, silly and selfish though it seemed. She sighed…then tensed.

The heartthrob echo of pain in her left arm and down her side, her constant companion for three days, changed into something racing. A wave of terror swept through her, and she could not tell if the first breath of it was Dag’s or her own, though the panting that followed seemed all hers. The rhythm broke up into something chaotic and uneven; then it muted. No, don’t die—

It didn’t, but neither did it return to its former definition. Absent gods forfend, what was that? She gulped, flipped down her tent flap behind her, and started walking quickly up the shore road, breaking into a trot till she grew winded, then walking again. She did not want to draw stares by running like a frightened deer.

She passed patroller headquarters, where one of Omba’s horse girls was leading off two spent mounts, heads down, lathered, and muddy. Only couriers in a hurry would ride horses in wet like that, but Fawn quelled hope, or fear, of word from Dag’s company; Fairbolt had said today would still be too soon. Considering the deathly signals he was waiting for, she could not wish for more speed.

She popped up the steps to Hoharie’s medicine cabin—medicine tent, she corrected the thought—and stood for a moment trying to catch her breath, then pushed inside.

Hoharie’s apprentice, what was his name, Othan, came out of the herb room and frowned at her. “What do you want, farmer girl?”

Fawn ignored his tone. “Hoharie. Said I should come see her. If anything changed in my marriage cord. Something just did.”

Othan glanced at the closed door to the inner room. “She’s doing some groundwork. You’ll have to wait.” Reluctantly, he jerked his head toward the empty chair by the writing table, then went back into the herb room. Something pungent was cooking over its small fireplace, making the hot chambers hotter.

Fawn sat and jittered, rubbing her left arm, though her probing fingers made no difference to the sensations. The former throbbing had been a source of fear to her for days, but now she wished for it back. And why should her throat feel as though she was choking?

After what seemed forever, the door to the inner chamber opened, and a buxom woman came out with a boy of maybe three in her arms. He was frowning and feverish, eyes glazed, his head resting against her shoulder and his thumb stuck in his mouth. Hoharie followed, gave Fawn a nod of acknowledgment, and went with them into the herb room. A murmur of low voices, instructions to Othan, then Hoharie returned and gestured Fawn before her into the inner room, closing the door behind them.

Fawn turned and mutely thrust out her arm.

“Sit, girl,” Hoharie sighed, pointing to a table in the corner with a pair of chairs. Hoharie winced as she settled across from Fawn, stretching her back, and Fawn wondered what she had just done for that little boy, and how much it had cost her in her ground. Would she even be able to help Fawn just now?

While Hoharie, her eyes half-closed, felt up and down Fawn’s arm, Fawn stammered out a description of what had just happened. Her words sounded confused and inadequate in her own ears, and she was afraid they conveyed nothing to the medicine maker except maybe the idea that she was going crazy. But Hoharie listened without comment.

Hoharie at last sat up and shook her head. “Well, this was odd before, and it’s odder now, but without any other information I’m blighted if I can guess what’s really going on.”

“That’s no help!” It came out something between a bark and a wail, and Fawn bit her lip in fear she had offended the maker, but Hoharie merely shook her head again in something between exasperation and agreement.

Hoharie opened her mouth to say more, but then paused, arrested, her head turning toward the door. In a moment, boot steps sounded on the porch outside, and the squeak of the door opening. “Fairbolt,” Hoharie muttered, “and…?”

A rap at the inner door, and Fairbolt’s voice: “Hoharie? It’s urgent.”

“Come in.”

Fairbolt shouldered through, followed by—tall Dirla. Fawn gasped and sat up. Dirla was as mud-spattered as the horse she must have ridden in on, braids awry, shirt reeking of dried and new sweat, her face lined with fatigue under sunburn. Her eyes, though, were bright.

“They got the malice,” Fairbolt announced, and Hoharie let out her breath with a triumphant hoot that made Dirla smile. Fairbolt cast Fawn a curious look. “About two hours after midnight, three nights back.”

Fawn’s hand went to her cord. “But that was when…What happened to Dag? How bad was he hurt?”

Dirla gave her a surprised nod, but replied, “It’s, um, hard to say.”

“Why?”

Fairbolt, his eyes on Hoharie, pulled the patroller forward, and said, “Tell your tale again, Dirla.”

As Dirla began a description of the company’s hard ride west, Fawn realized the pair must have come to find Hoharie, not her. Why? Get to the part about Dag, blight you, Dirla!

“…we came up on Bonemarsh about noon, but the malice had moved—south twenty miles, we found out later, launching a big attack toward Farmer’s Flats. Dag wouldn’t let us stop for anything, even those poor makers. I’d never seen anything like it. The malice had enslaved the grounds of these Bonemarsh folk, somehow making them cook up a new batch of mud-men for it, or so Dag claimed. It left them tied to trees. The patrol was pretty upset when Dag ordered us to leave them in place, but Mari and Codo came in on his side, and Dag had this look on his face that made us afraid to press him, so we rode on.”

Fawn gnawed her knuckles through Dirla’s excited description of the veiled patrol slipping through an enemy-occupied farm at night, the breathless scramble up a hill, the rush upon a bizarre crude tower. “My partner Mari had almost made it to the top when the malice jumped down—must have been over twenty feet. Like it was flying. I never knew a malice could look so beautiful…Utau went for it. I had my ground shut tight, but later Utau said the malice just peeled his open like popping the husk off a hickory nut. He thought he was done for, but then Dag, who didn’t even have a sharing knife, went for the thing barehanded. Bare-hooked, anyway. It left Utau and turned on him. Mari shouted for me and threw me down her knife, and I didn’t quite see what happened then. Anyway, I drove Mari’s knife into the thing, and all its bright flesh…burst. Horrible. And I thought it was over, and we were all home alive, and it was a miracle. Utau staggered over and draped himself on me till Razi could get to him—and then we saw Dag.”

Fawn rocked, hunched tight with her arms wrapping her waist to keep from interrupting. Or screaming.

Dirla went on, “He was passed out in the dirt, stiff as a corpse, with his ground wrapped up so tight it was stranglin’ him, and no one could get through to try to make a match or a reinforcement, though Mari and Codo and Hann all tried. For the next few hours, we all thought he was dying. Half-ground-ripped, like Utau, but worse.”

“Wait,” said Hoharie. “Wasn’t he physically injured at all?”

Dirla shook her head. “Maybe knocked around a bit, but nothing much. But then, around dawn, he just woke up. And got up. He didn’t look any too good, mind you, but he made it onto his horse somehow and pushed us all back to Bonemarsh. Seems he was fretting over those makers we’d left, as well he might.

“When we arrived, the rest of the company had made it in, but those makers—their groundlock didn’t break when the malice died, and no one could figure out why not. Worse, anyone who tries to open grounds to them gets drawn into their lock, too. Obio lost three patrollers finding that one out. Dag believes they’re all dying. Mari couldn’t get him to leave them, though she thinks he should be on the sick list—it’s like he’s obsessed. Though by the time us couriers left that evening, we’d at least got him to sleep for a while. Utau and Mari, they don’t like any of it one little bit. So”—Dirla turned her gaze on the medicine maker, her hands clutching each other in unaccustomed plea—“Dag said he wished he had you there, Hoharie, because he needs someone who knows folks’ grounds down deep. So I’m asking for you for him, because Dag—he got us through. He got us all through.”

Fairbolt cleared his throat. “Would you be willing to ride to Raintree, Hoharie?”

An appalled look came over the medicine maker’s face as she stared wildly around at her workplace. Fawn thought she could just about see the crowded roster of tasks here racing through Hoharie’s mind.

“—in an hour?” Fairbolt continued relentlessly.

“Fairbolt!” Hoharie huffed dismay. After a long, long moment she added, “Could you make it two hours?”

Fairbolt returned a short, satisfied nod. “I’ll have two patrollers ready to escort you, and whoever you need to take with you.”

Fawn blurted, “Can I come with you? Because I think I’m part of Dag’s puzzle, too.” She nearly held out her left arm in evidence.

The three Lakewalkers stared down at her in uncomplimentary surprise.

Fawn hurried on, “It’s not a war zone anymore, and if I went with you, I couldn’t get lost, so I wouldn’t be being stupid at all. I could be ready in an hour. Less.”

Dirla said, not scornfully but in a tone of kindness that was somehow even more annoying, “That fat little plow horse of yours couldn’t keep up, Fawn.”

“Grace is not fat!” said Fawn indignantly. At least, not very. “And she may not be a racehorse, but she’s persistent.” She added after a moment, as her wits caught up with her mouth, “Anyhow, couldn’t you put me up on a patrol horse just like Hoharie?”

Fairbolt smiled a little, but shook his head. “No, Fawn. The malice may be gone, but north Raintree is going to be disrupted for weeks yet, in the aftermath of all this. I made a promise to Dag to see you came to no harm while he was gone, and I mean to keep it.”

“But—”

Fairbolt’s voice firmed in a way that made Fawn think of her father at his most maddening. “Farmer child, you are one more worry I don’t need to have right now. Others have to wait for their husbands and wives to return as well.”

And what was the counterargument to that? I am not a child? Oh, sure, that one had always worked so well. “Funny, I ran around out there in the wide world for eighteen years without your protection, and survived.” Barely, she was depressingly reminded.

A bitter smile bent Fairbolt’s lips, and he murmured, “No, farmer child…you’ve always had our protection.” Fawn flushed. As she dropped her eyes in shame, he gave a satisfied nod, and went on more kindly, “I imagine Cattagus and Sarri would be glad to learn the news about the malice. Maybe you could run and let them know.”

It was a clear dismissal. Run along. Fawn looked around and found no allies, not Dirla, and not even Hoharie, despite the curious look in her eyes; the medicine tent might be her realm, but it was plain the road was Fairbolt’s, and she would yield to his judgment in the matter.

Fawn swallowed, nodded, and took herself out, as chairs scraped and the conference continued more intently. Without her. Not being a Lakewalker and all.

She stumped up the path between the medicine tent and Fairbolt’s headquarters, fuming and rubbing her arm. Its thrumming echoed in her heart and head and gut until she was in a fair way to screaming from it. So was she a Lakewalker bride or a farmer bride? Because if the first was under Lakewalker disciplines, the other could not be. People couldn’t just switch her label back and forth at their convenience. Fair was fair, if not, hah, Fairbolt.

In one thing she was surely expert, and that was running away from home. Of which the first well-tested rule was, don’t give folks a chance to argue with you. How had she forgotten that one? She set her teeth and turned aside at patroller headquarters.

A pair of patrollers conferring over a logbook looked up as she entered. “Fairbolt’s not here,” said one.

“I know,” Fawn replied breezily. “I just talked with him up at Hoharie’s.” Which was perfectly true, right? No one, later, could say she’d lied. “I need to borrow one of his maps for a bit. I’ll bring it back as soon as I can.”

The patroller shrugged and nodded, and Fawn whipped into Fairbolt’s pegboard chamber, hastily rolled up the map of north Raintree still out on top of the center table, tucked it under her arm, and left, smiling and waving thanks.

She dogtrotted to Mare Island, let herself through the bridge gate, and found one of Omba’s girls in the work shed.

“I need my horse,” said Fawn. “I want to take her out for some exercise.” A hundred or so miles worth.

“She could use some,” the girl conceded. Then, after a moment, “Oh, that’s right. You need help summoning her.” The girl sniffed, grabbed a halter and line off a nail, and wandered out into the pastures.

While she was gone, Fawn hastily found an old sack and filled it with what she judged to be a three-day supply of oats. Was it stealing, to take the equivalent of what her mare would have eaten anyhow? She decided not to pursue the moral fine point, as the lush grass here grew free and the grain had to be painstakingly brought in from off island. She considered hiding the sack under her skirts, decided it would involve walking funny, then, remembering that sneak thief down in Lumpton Market, just cast it over her shoulder as if she’d a right. The horse girl, when she led Grace in, didn’t even ask about it.

Back at Tent Bluefield, Fawn tied Grace to a tree while she went inside, skinned into her riding clothes, and swiftly packed her saddlebags. She pulled her sharing knife from its place in Dag’s trunk and slung it around her neck under her shirt, then fastened the steel knife Dag had given her to her belt. Last, she plopped plunkins into her saddlebags opposite the grain sack till they balanced, and fastened the buckles. Food and to spare for one little farmer girl for a three-day ride, and no stopping.

Finally, she fished Dag’s spare quill and ink bottle from the bottom of his trunk and knelt beside it, penning a short note on a scrap of cloth. Dear Cattagus and Sarri. Dag’s company killed the malice, but he’s hurt, so I’m going to Raintree to meet up with him, because he’s my husband, and I have a right. Ask Dirla about the rest. Back soon. Love, Fawn. She worked it into the tent-flap ties, where it fluttered discreetly but visibly. Then she stood on a stump to saddle Grace, heaved up and tied on her saddlebags, and climbed aboard. She was over the bridge in ten minutes more.